I've noticed similar behavior with 2 other vendors that I use a lot lately -- they'll kill a feature or way of doing something, then build it back in slowly over time. Meanwhile, the end user is stuck with reduced features. I think I'm not Agile enough to understand how this helps.
Example 1 -- VMWare -- after announcing that they were effectively killing the VSphere Client Windows application, they announced a replacement -- the Flash-based web client. Oops, all the browser manufacturers started dumping Flash, _and_ VMWare admins hated it anyway. So now, they're slowly re-introducing a new HTML5 based client that only has basic features, but gets new ones with every release. You have to run the Flash client anyway to do anything beyond basic admin stuff in this latest build.
Example 2 -- Citrix -- During their heart attack-inducing takeover by a hedge fund, they merged XenApp and XenDesktop into a single technology stack to save development money. XenApp (arguably the #1 killer app for healthcare application delivery) actually lost features for several versions in the early 7.x environment while the development teams were building them back into the XenDesktop model. It wasn't uncommon to hear "Oh yeah, this doesn't work in 7.3, it's scheuled for 7.7" or similar.
I'm all for continuous integration, agile development and all that, but does it make sense for enterprise applications to follow the same model of a consumer service like Netflix or Facebook?
For me, docking stations and big monitors allow me to use my laptop in a reasonably comfortable work environment. But, there are still use cases for desktop PCs, especially those that aren't shoved into the back of an all-in-one monitor. You're not going to let a call center employee in a regulated, locked down environment pull out his iPad or laptop to work, for example. A cash register is likely going to be some sort of PC, same thing with a kiosk or ATM. And at the high end, workstations are meant for "real" work - though most have the Xeon processors in them. It's an interesting time; desktops and thin clients are sort of merging and tablet use is demanding more of CPU manufacturers' attention. And this makes sense - mobile stuff has the constant pressure to be squeezed into smaller spaces, produce less heat, provide more on-chipset functionality and run cooler at the same time. I'm still surprised when I see a Surface Pro or other convertible tablet and remember that there's a full-fat Intel processor crammed inside that tiny case without melting through the bottom!
I just think the desktop market is maturing and there's less and less that Intel processors and chipsets don't natively provide. PC processors are already insanely fast and powerful for what typical users throw at them. Desktops aren't dead, they're just a niche market these days, but one that is still there. The pundits want to claim that no one wants a powerful client device and just wants all their stuff streamed from the cloud onto a tablet or phone they don't control. I think that's true in the consumer space, but businesses still have use cases for desktops.
I'm OK with this, which is probably going to get me labeled a lazy French socialist. (I'm in the US.) But, I've worked jobs where I've had to be available 24/7 on an on-call rotation basis. Weeks where I've had to do this sucked badly. It was earlier in my career pre-kids, but the feeling is exactly like having a newborn at home in terms of the sleep quality you get. You're never fully asleep after being woken up at 3 AM for yet another false alarm (or real emergency!) And, I was lucky it was rotation work -- lots of companies have cut so much staff that they just make everyone on-call for the applications they support these days.
I think that a lot of people, especially young ones in their first jobs, don't realize how much they're being taken advantage of by employers. The other people against this are hard-driving "tech entrepreneurs" who have the crazy Type-A personalities anyway and would work 30 hours a day if it was possible. If you're just out of college and don't have a family, significant other, or even a time consuming hobby, you might not realize that it's healthy to turn off work when it's time to go home, and spend the remainder of the day focusing on your own pursuits. Same thing with the entrepreneurs, they live to work and have no idea why anyone would want to be doing anything other than responding to 3 AM emails. The reality is that the vast majority of people are not driven to work 18 hour days -- they want more out of life.
Does this make me lazy? I doubt it -- I work like crazy to fit my tasks into a standard workday, and count myself lucky that I'm not in support anymore responding to pager calls at night. I do have a self-imposed flexible schedule -- my wife has a long commute so I sometimes do a lot of family things during the day. So, I will occasionally send out a 2 AM email, but it's my choice because I left work 3 hours early that day. What i don't get is people who call this move by the French "lazy" -- do they really want to be chained to work 24 hours a day? Do they not have lives outside of work?
I try very hard not to look at email, Facebook or the news until I've had a chance to wake up, get the kids out of bed and get ready for the day. Working for a global company in systems integration, most of the first emails in the morning are from India or other countries far ahead of us timezone-wise, and they're almost never good news. My first few morning messages from the last week have been similar to: - Yet another broken code release failed in production and they're throwing it back over the wall to the systems guys for the 20 millionth time - The developers are going to be late again delivering something that was due 3 months ago - Company that has repeatedly presented itself as world-renowned Technology X experts is proving yet again they were lying
Looking at that as the first thing you see when you wake up, it sets the tone for the rest of the day. You wake up mad, aren't as nice as you should be to the spouse or kids, resulting in "if mama's not happy, no one's happy", resulting in pretty much guaranteeing a bad day. If everyone's doing this every day, no wonder we have so many pissed off, uncivil interactions with others. Everyone's mad!
It's not as roll-your-own as it used to be, but I still enjoy working with computers. The big trend I see causing long term issues is consumerization -- everyone is demanding services that work 100% of the time on their phones, so everything is geared towards that. My big thing is scripting and automation -- making something idiot proof so I can send it out to idiots.;-) I don't have much time for gaming anymore as I have 2 little kids, but when they get old enough I'm sure I'll get back into it.
One thing I miss of late is physical hardware. I'm a data center nerd at heart and love getting the odd project to do equipment installs, etc. These days it's kind of a treat to do that because all our on-premises stuff runs in VMs and other stuff runs in some cloud data center...I can't remember the last time I worked directly with some of our VM host servers. But, it's a change just like any other in our field. So many people I know are upset about change, and yes, the environment has gotten a lot less "fun" in that a lot of problems are solved. But like I keep explaining over and over to bosses and anyone who will listen, the problems don't disappear -- they just move around, some get smaller while others get larger. Even with the downward salary pressure and rampant ageism, I don't think I'd go back and do something different even if I could -- if you keep learning and pick your projects carefully things stay interesting.
I think companies will still build their own image or use the Windows 10 provisioning tools to slice and dice the image deployed by the factory, but for Lenovo's laptops this makes sense. ThinkPad professional series users (T and P series) are paying a lot of money for their machines compared to the $300 consumer junk at the low end of the line. I'm just about to replace my T540p and the prices are super-high, almost Apple level margin. It should be noted that you do get what you pay for - ThinkPad users are pretty loyal customers and the laptops have a certain "anti-hipster" all-business look and feel.
I think all PC manufacturers should adopt this approach. Leave the bloatware for the consumer models...after all, everyone needs 3 firewall and antivirus applications running on home machines. Ever since Windows 7, Microsoft has been working with the vendors to build more of the software controls into the OS for various hardware components, reducing the need for buggy vendor applications to do things like control volume and brightness. (One of the worst things about building a hybrid desktop-laptop disk image for PCs is managing the multiple post-OS installations of vendor packages that are required to control things.)
This just makes good sense. It gets Lenovo some good press to put the bloatware security debacle behind them, and sets the tone for other manufacturers. After all, aren't PCs dying? Doesn't everyone use business apps on a 9" tablet screen? In that market, people who need PCs are going to pay specialty prices to get a quality product.
I've worked for companies whose core business was not IT, and also for the service providers who "service" businesses who outsource their IT. The one thing I can definitely see happening long term to companies that kill their IT departments is a loss of creative solutions to unique in-house problems. Here's why:
IT services companies don't care about the business. - I say this as someone who works for one. It's almost impossible to get an employee of a third party to put in more than the minimum required to keep the contract and their jobs. The only ones who seem to succeed in this are services companies that sign long term contracts, keep local people and keep working conditions good enough that people don't quit.
Services companies will only do standard things, absent minimum 6 figure change orders - An IT services company's goal is to keep the cost of delivering the service as low as possible, otherwise they don't make money. The ways they do that is offshoring of tasks (as we see in this and many other cases,) or charging the customer for every microsecond of effort expended that isn't explicitly spelled out in the contract. Remember, the services company has to come in cheaper than the existing IT department (on paper) and has to generate enough money to pay a lot of non-technical management salaries such as multiple layers of account executives, project managers, change managers, etc. You can't offshore reliably unless the task can be boiled down to a single non-changing script that executes with very little technical staff involvement. This is where we get stuff like ITIL, a weeks-long change management process, etc.
Everything is slooooowwww. - Any company that outsources their IT can no longer go down the hall and ask someone to help them. Anecdote: The specialized IT services company I work for offshored their tech support but kept some application support guys local. I needed to get access to an internal application controlled by these guys, and was told by the outsourcer they'd be fired if they helped me without a ticket. I actually had to go back to my desk, file a ticket, and show them that it was in the system on the way to them. The change was done right away, but the ticket bounced from a technical router in India to a first level helpdesk in Costa Rica, to the application support guys...it took over a day for that to happen. Forget about actually getting something changed in production -- it takes weeks in the worst organizations I've seen.
Nothing new or innovative will come out of IT again. - This is actually what worries me the most. IT services companies doing the lowest common denominator work are not going to come up with any brilliant cost-saving strategies other than "buy more services from us" or "buy our Cloud." Companies that do IT right actually do gain benefits from IT proportional to their cost. Over time, relying too hard on offshore IT that can't do anything beyond the basics makes it harder to convince CIOs that they should consider bringing it back in-house.
Think about it -- ITIL is actively designed to prevent changes to systems. Agile, JIRA and full reliance on frameworks on the dev side is designed to reduce the required skill level of developers. Both of these are championed by offshoring firms because they make it easier to break up the work and send it to the cheapest possible location.
I think that was the original reason for public companies to exist. Unfortunately, any real investment is now so far abstracted from shareholders that it barely registers. On one side are the investment banks doing high frequency trading and demanding constant increased revenue, and on the other are the intermediate mutual funds, hedge funds and others that own most of a public company's shares. Individual investors have very little to do with a company's success -- most hot tech stocks don't even pay dividends and they have to make their profits by selling when the price gets pumped up. Public companies don't answer to their individual shareholders -- they have to please their institutional ones and have to make short term, employee-unfriendly and consumer-hostile decisions as a result. Founder CEOs who care about their companies often end up getting pushed out because of this.
A good recent example of this is Citrix. I work in airline IT, where XenApp is being increasingly used to make Windows deployments simpler. I also know lots of healthcare IT workers -- XenApp/XenDesktop is basically the only choice in app delivery for hospitals. They have a massive customer base, fiercely loyal customers and a huge bench of people who specialize in XenApp. Plus, almost every electronic health records application is a fat, bloated mess requiring massive processor and RAM to run - basically all of them are hack jobs and need to run on server-class hardware. Given that, you would think Citrix would be happy raking in licensing fees like Microsoft does -- it is not cheap software. Nope! An "activist investment" firm (Elliott Management) bought them a few years back, threw out the CEO (who founded the company)then cut development funding to the bone and started piecing out the company for sale. It took a few messy releases of their core products to convince the new owners to start reinvesting resources in them. The tech press was posting stories wondering what big healthcare companies would do without a stable Citrix product.
It all boils down to the short term nature of thinking that public companies are forced into by the market. This is terrible for long term stability, but great if you're trying to pump up the stock price for a quick sale. It's always been there, but the increased speed of the market has brought it to a point where no public company can do anything the investors see as long term investment. Lowering the barriers to individual investors is just a tiny fraction of the problem -- it used to be a huge expensive pain to buy or sell a stock so people bought for the long term. The other problem is that so many people have their retirements tied up in the market more directly. When it was insurance companies and pension funds doing most of the investing, there was a lot more room for error and time to make up for mistakes. Now, a single screw up doesn't get averaged out over time, so there's constant pressure for unsustainable growth. I almost want to see something even more abstract than a mutual fund offered for long term investors so that companies have some breathing room and don't make decisions that kill them in the long run.
I agree that some people who are stuck in rural communities where the entire economy has disappeared are in this spot. However, I do have experience with this - I've worked several menial positions (gas station, stock clerk in a department store, fast food) and anyone who was still there beyond their early 20s was there because they were stuck there. They lacked education, and I'm not of the opinion that they were closet scientists waiting to be discovered. I can see how people think that this is condescending, mean, etc...but if you work all day with reasonably intelligent people you might assume that everyone is like that -- I assure you they're not. Education is lost on a small fraction of these people..nothing you do will help them.
As for smugness, I'm not -- I know that my job is next to be eliminated, as is anything that doesn't explicitly require human hands or a more fluid less logical brain. I do feel that people who can't help themselves need to be guided by people smarter than them...and that goes for everyone. No one is a lone wolf, expert at everything.
Another anecdote from my past -- I went to college with a guy who worked the night shift at a local warehouse for a grocery store chain. According to him, the work was miserable, hot in summer, freezing in winter, and consisted of picking, palletizing and loading groceries on trucks. But, it was a union job and therefore paid well with the shift differentials, etc. One of the things he mentioned was that there were a ton of full timers working there, and the big step for them was to graduate from part time to full time eligible union members -- because the union would ensure they would have steady work for as long as they wanted. The full timers were the only ones eligible to become forklift operators and other slightly less mind numbing jobs. This is why the old economy was so successful -- even if it was a horrible job you hated, you could get a job with very little education and have enough money to raise a family and get by. This new phase we're going into isn't going to have these safe jobs, and any that remain are going to be forced down to minimum wage. BTW, the same goes for the customer facing positions in union grocery stores - look at all the 40 and 50 year old cashier supervisors and department managers. When A&P went bankrupt and closed tons of supermarkets here, it really threw some people for a loop because they'd been working at the same supermarket chain for 25+ years and the union had to scramble to find the most senior ones jobs. Multiply this by millions and you get a taste of what's coming.
The things that really bother me about Facebook are the fake news (on both sides) and the fact that it's a total echo chamber (also on both sides.) Since the platform is designed to pull you in, of course it's going to show you only things you like. A right wing Republican is going to watch Fox News and listen to Rush Limbaugh, and that's where almost all of them get their news and opinons from. Same goes on the left -- MSNBC is certainly not going to try to publish an opinion that might alienate one of their assets...er...viewers. Facebook and other online sources are the primary news source for almost everyone under 30, and they use algorithms that fine-tune the narrative for anyone watching. It makes sense because their business model is collecting all your activity and social network, packaging you up and selling you to advertisers.
I think Trump won for two reasons -- first, social media really did have an effect on people. Second, the traditional media were treating him as a complete joke right up until the election. I admit that I was thinking like that too -- how could anyone elect an offensive, chronically bankrupt real estate investor with zero political or military experience? But, Facebook and friends concentrate people's opinions and the anger is strong among many people...when your company has the power to magnify sentiments like this and convince people the world is falling apart, yes, you are a media company whether you like it or not.
I don't agree with Uber's business model, but they have explicitly stated from day 1 that regulations don't apply to them, "this time it's different", we're disruptors, etc. A move like refusing to follow the DMV's process will be seen by the company's true fans as a big middle finger to those "corrupt Luddite government organizations." It's the equivalent of taking your ball and going home.
What will probably happen next is Uber will wallpaper smaller non-CA state/city officals' offices with money until they agree to let them operate. They'll turn around and say how progressive these cities are, and look at Luddite California...oh by the way we're moving to Texas/North Carolina/Georgia to spite them...
I'd be fine with Uber if they paid their drivers as employees, followed the local taxi licensing procedures like all the other cab companies do, and incurred the same expenses a traditional cab company did to get into business. They make money because they just declare the rules don't apply to them. I see why too - so many people I meet in the tech sector are classic Ayn Rand devotees who basically want the government dismantled anyway. Most techies are obsessed with automation and productivity and have no idea that basically every business in the world has to follow rules, pay corrupt officials, and has startup costs.
And why is it not sustainable? Because the greedy business owner who owns that assembly line wants to keep all of that $75K for himself?
This is what I don't get about business owners. They complain bitterly about "crippling regulations" and "job killing policies" but they're immeasurably better off than people they employ. Regulations are not expensive to comply with. Spending a few extra minutes filling out paperwork once a year isn't going to kill your business. Paying for reasonable worker safety equipment isn't going to bankrupt you. And, if paying employees a reasonable wage will bankrupt you, then you shouldn't be in business. I have absolutely no sympathy for wealthy restaurant owners making huge profits, then claiming that they can't pay someone $15 an hour. Business owners benefit from tax loopholes that wage owners can only dream of...they pay significantly less tax percentage-wise than individuals. Big companies pay zero or get refunds. The minimum wage complainers earn double an average employee's hourly salary on the first restaurant check, and the amount they pay in salary is tax-deductible as cost of goods sold.
It's funny how these things go from a few "wackos" talking about robots taking over manufacturing, to the US government actually acknowledging there may be a problem with the system sooner than we think. I do think people are trying to lay the groundwork now, to minimize the negative effects. I could imagine some pretty bad methods of "population control" to use a euphemistic term if we tried to carry over the current system with majority unemployment being the norm.
Of course, this is a parting shot from the outgoing administration -- given Trump's cabinet picks, I foresee some pretty nasty congressional fights and an eventual dismantling of most social programs. The Social Security system may be handed over to hedge funds and banks for safe keeping, Meidicare may become a voucher system that just enriches the insurance companies, and what little welfare there is left may be taken away. I'm happy the current administration is getting it on the record that we've been warned...it could be an interesting historical footnote or maybe a wake-up call.
The fact is that even though "AI" isn't nearly as thrilling as the pundits claim, it is good enough at this point to displace a huge number of very vulnerable people. People aren't working assembly line or fast food jobs because they love the work...they're doing it because it's the only thing they're capable of. That's the first problem -- a lot of people are poorly educated, and a great number of those won't benefit from additional education resources getting thrown at them. Median IQ is 100 -- there's a lot of people at or below that. Unless you want to start engineering society to model "Brave New World," you either need to find something for these people to do, or allow them to do nothing and stop complaining.
The next iteration is what I'm worried about -- professionals could easily have their roles reduced. Doctors and lawyers are a good example -- most of medical and law school is designed to select for people with photographic memories and dump volumes of information into their brains. When that knowledge doesn't need to be kept in someone's brain anymore, the status of the professional holding it is reduced. Same thing goes for IT -- I'm in systems architecture so I'm designing stuff and coming up with procedures, and it's obvious where things are headed. Hands-on IT work is almost at the point where we just need to tell someone to plug in cables, remove hard drives, etc. Development is moving offshore and increasingly done as a series of pre-formed code components and microservices. Note that this also goes for almost every office job out there too. Working in corporate IT, I see so many generic C-strudent business majors from Big State University performing an updated version of a 40 year old process. It sounds like a good idea to increase productivity by automating and replacing them, but I haven't lost sight of the fact that these people are having kids, buying products and living in communities. Take them out, and no one's around to buy the things your company is making in their fully automated factories.
Lots of people are saying this will never happen and that anyone who suggests it will is a Luddite. Maybe so, but I don't see anywhere for most workers to go -- there's no retraining for jobs that don't exist in the modern AI world. It's going to require a radical rethinking of how we define work, wealth, etc. And if it isn't done very carefully, it will lead to a very bad end. Imagine the uproar when you tell everyone that the retirement savings they worked for all their lives won't need to be saved up by future generations, or that we have to enact more social safety programs for the 80% and rising unemployed people out there. If this is done badly, it will lead to the owners of businesses hoarding everything for themselves or calls to control the population in certain ways.
Correlation does not imply causation. There, now that the elephant in the room has been addressed...
I can totally see social media leading to depression long term. Seriously, you have an entire set of platforms dedicated to championing narcissism and self promotion. I mentioned this a while back in a post about LinkedIn -- one of the things that drives me nuts is, having LinkedIn contacts from the tech and the business world, I notice the business guys posting the same shallow crap they do on Facebook looking for a circle of positive affirmation.
Why do I think it makes people depressed and anxious? A couple reasons... - It's one-sided -- no one posts about the totally uninteresting, crappy boring parts of their lives. Unless you're rich beyond imagination or a celebrity, everyone will have down moments in their lives, periods of disappointment, and very sad things happen to them. - There's a pressure to be "always on" -- Stemming from the one-sided positive view of everything, people who might not be doing so well might feel the pressure to act like everything's fine. Having been there, as everyone has, I can't imagine how that feels in social media happy-land...it sucks in real life! There's a constant pressure to be on 24/7, sharing amazing details of your life. Thinking that everyone except you is doing perfectly is a recipe for depression. - The trolls -- Oh, the trolls, the cyberbullies...The Internet in general and social media specifically brings out the worst in people because they feel they're protected from behind the nice safe keyboard. Look at any news site comments section that uses Facebook identities. Now, people who rant on MSN or CNN are a self-selecting bunch, I'll grant you that -- but take a look sometime and see what people post. You'll see some of the most hateful, racist, angry, spiteful, snide commentary...right next to "John Smith, History Teacher, East Nowhere High School." I've had moments where I've thought "No way, that can't be that person's real name and occupation!" -- and then gone to LinkedIn or similar and found out that yes, that history teacher, dental hygienist or business owner really does correspond to the profile. It's (in my opinion) a sad commentary on how un-civil we are to each other.
Personally, I'm not a big fan. I'd rather blog or post long-form comments on places like this than be constantly tweeting out yet another happy status update to make other people miserable. I enjoy thinking before writing and tend to prefer civil conversations.
The only thing that matters to the macro-economy as a whole is employment. Unless you plan on replacing the entire "money as a store of value" system, you need a supply of all kinds of jobs across the employment spectrum to ensure money can flow. Otherwise, we see what's happening now -- the rich just hoard all the money and pull up the ladder behind them. The only measures of economic health that matter are employment and velocity of money. Trade is only beneficial when both countries are on the same economic footing.
India's regulations may seem harsh, but they do ensure that manufacturing remains a viable career path. The fantasy of turning everyone in the US into intellectuals and forcing everyone to go to college has to stop at some point. You need a 2-track system -- one way to a comfortable living is education and professional work, and the other is high-paying factory and trade work with a similar career path guaranteed by unions or similar devices.
Well, let's think about this one...which one would you rather manufacture? - A high-margin computer, with high end components, requiring a lot of engineering effort to get right and keep supporting over an extended life cycle, or - An even higher-margin, throwaway, replaced every 2 years, locked down device, on which you get a 30% cut of every single thing a user installs on it -- requiring lots less engineering since user interactions are artificially limited
I have been a long-time Mac user and supporter, but I'm mainly on Windows and Linux PCs now. Even locked-down spyware-laden Windows 10 is more customizable than Mac OS is these days, and most Windows/Linux hardware manufacturers don't solder the components onto the motherboard. (Surface Pro, you're the exception of course, but at least there's still ports on it.)
A lot of people might not know that India has a very protectionist policy regarding manufactured goods. It's very difficult to get items into the country from outside if there's any chance they will be used to conduct business. The company I work for is currently engaged in a love affair with India and Brazil for offshore development. Some of the stuff they're writing requires local access to hardware they can't just buy off the shelf from a distributor...there are only a few manufacturers out there and they're not making it in India. Getting anything into both of these countries that wasn't made there doesn't just involve paying a duty -- there's a byzantine maze of regulations, forms, local officials to pay, special assessments, personal visits to Government Agency X for stamps and signatures, etc. Last time this happened it took 4 months to ship the offshore company hardware -- and that's with our company having connections in the form of logistics specialists who know what actually needs to happen.
Apple just doesn't want to lose a potential market of over a billion people. They'd rather take the short term "loss" manufacturing at slightly above slave labor rates to ensure their products can be sold domestically. This is also happening to a lesser extent in Brazil, for the same reasons.
It's very ironic that a country whose major export seems to be IT "services" to the US and Europe has such a protectionist policy regarding manufacturing. Maybe they see what's happening in their customers' countries and don't want to have a rebellion on their hands when wages start going up inside their country. Personally, I'm for protectionism. It's a balance against the power of companies. Growing up in the Rust Belt and watching whole cities get hollowed out as companies chased cheap Southern, then foreign labor, was not fun. I seriously doubt Trump is going to follow through on his tariffs and protectionist platform...his buddies are going to demand that he put a stop to it, and they have more power than the working class types who helped vote him in.
I think the costs are similar to other tech startups - it's no different than the dotcom bubble: - They need a massive, slick marketing and social media campaign -- those don't come cheap because they're creative work. Look at how many millions of dollars companies waste on things like choosing colors and redesigning their logos. - To build marketing share, they have to sell below cost. Chase is offering $30 of free Uber rides to anyone who has one of their cards...they're not just giving that away. - Uber has to maintain office space in some of the highest-rent districts of the most expensive cities in the world. That office space has to conform to tech bubble standards, including the designer furniture, collaborative work pods, etc. - They have to pay huge salaries to "RESTful JavaScript Engineers" banging out code for their apps and website. In the last bubble, the magic word was HTML -- this bubble appears to be centered around APIs and frameworks but it's the same idea. - In order to "poach top talent" from Google and other companies, they have to spend massive amounts on perks, including celebrity chefs cooking 3 meals a day, bus service, personal trainers, accommodations for employees' pets, full service concierges to keep the employees at the office 100 hours a week, etc. - And of course, the founders and management class have to draw their big salaries and bonuses.
The one thing that is different with Uber is that I'm sure they spend boatloads on "lobbying." They have to go to every single state transportation and insurance official, city council and mayor of big cities out there and...tell them how great Uber is. Corruption is way more overt in most local governments than it is at the federal level, so I wouldn't be surprised if they're accidentally losing large sums of cash in these officials' offices during their visits. The amounts might be lower, but local officials will come right out and demand it rather than at the Congressional level where you have to filter it through lobbyists.
I'm still surprised that this Second Dotcom Bubble is playing out almost exactly like the First Dotcom Bubble. Uber's probably being rational -- live as high as you can for as long as the money holds out.
One of the things that appeared during the last few bubbles were various non-GAAP measurements of revenue, profitability, etc. that startups published to show their progress. It's very interesting to see that they weren't able to use these tricks^Wtechniques to paper over the losses they're making trying to get to a massive market share. It makes sense -- they seem to have the public on their side willing to throw out all the taxi regulations in the name of disruption. If they can get all the rules repealed, or write new ones that favor them, then long term it will work out even If they give away rides for less than cost. They just have to keep the VCs on the hook and paying money to fill the lobbyists' brown paper bags.
I took a couple of accounting classes in college back in the Dark Ages, and things like revenue recognition, cost of goods sold, etc. were very straightforward back then. The classic examples of a business were a manufacturer who buys raw materials and pays employees to turn out a value-added good that's sold at retail, or a professional charging an hourly or job-based rate for services. Now so many US companies are just pass-through entities charging a markup for services, or software companies not selling a product per se, or both. It makes it much more difficult to understand the company's finances, and I'm sure they prefer it that way so they don't have to explain uncomfortable things to investors, or just say "this time it's different", etc.
As for Uber themselves, I really don't like the fact that they choose to walk in and declare that the rules don't apply to them. The business owners' cries of crippling regulation ring quite hollow to me. In addition to protecting the public, I feel regulations balance the power that businesses have over ordinary workers and consumers. If I'm wrong about this, I'd love to hear real world examples of regulations that are "unbearable" for the typical small business owner. I feel it's just people complaining needlessly -- no one likes paying fees, taxes, etc. But be careful what you wish for -- without rules businesses will once again be allowed to sell unsafe products with no recourse or charge whatever they want for products without regard to all consumers' ability to pay.
I'm happy Finland is going down this route. They'll be way ahead of other countries when basically everyone of normal intelligence is unemployed due to automation. The US is going to get very ugly before anything like this happens, and if it did there would be a conservative uprising that I think would cause another civil war.
It makes perfect sense to anyone willing to see beyond themselves and the immediate future: -Increased entrepreneurship and new initiatives - Mid career professionals who have responsibilities aren't going to give up income from a job to go out and try some new business. People who have been thrown out of the workforce due to ageism after 40 might do this, but a lot don't have the basic skills or personality needed (I know I don't!) Basic income might encourage some of the more courageous to jump off the cliff and try something new. Increased late-career field changes and education -- Not many people in their 40s/50s can just jump out of the workforce for 4 years to learn a new skill, nor can they afford to start at a new grad wage in most cases. Having something to fall back on might encourage people to dump the job they hate and try something else. Allowing slackers to slack and workers to work - I work in big companies, and personally know so many people who are absolute dead wood. Some are just waiting to be found out and hoping they can make it to retirement. Others make the workplace toxic by complaining loudly about every single little thing. Getting these people out of jobs they hate and into something more suitable could be a function of the basic income. Theoretically you'd only be left with productive people who want to be there because they could walk whenever they felt like it. Curbing employee abuse - Another thing I see a lot is people who are absolutely stuck in their jobs because they can't live without an income. Employers use this leverage to exploit their workers.
I do think something has to be done. Factory jobs and paper movement jobs are disappearing quickly. One of the biggest social security disability insurance applicant pools are all the people in their 40s and 50s who can't find work. Rather than make them convince some doctor they're disabled, just give them the money they need to survive.
I wonder if it's not necessarily over-medication, but a reduction in under-reporting. Even in the golden age of the middle class (1950s or so in the US) people never talked about mental issues. Now, everyone talks about them, everyone's in therapy and everyone's taking something. It used to be somewhat normal for the father of a family to come home from work and get exceedingly drunk if he had a bad day -- that's not seen as normal now. Same thing with smoking - it's a really bad habit, but having almost every adult inhaling nicotine all day probably masked a lot of problems. So, the reduction in self-medication along with a reduction in the stigma associated with getting help might explain this. One problem I see is that if you need real help, not just a bunch of pills, that part of the system isn't there anymore. Most states are completely done with inpatient mental health services, only providing enough funding to house the truly dangerous and some of the cases that are hopeless and can't ever transition to a normal life. There's no way to call a time-out and dig into what's really wrong.
I do think that society has changed to a much higher level of under-the-surface stress. Those of us who work in IT for big companies are just waiting for the MBAs to finish their reports that will prompt the CIO to offshore the workforce. Even if you're not a "model consumer" everything costs a lot and is geared to having two well-compensated spouses working. As a parent in that spot, I can attest that it's very hard keeping all the balls in the air - you have to simultaneously focus on your job, your financial situation, your kids and your spouse. It's very stressful and I could definitely see people losing their grip on things if any extra stress gets heaped on top of it.
One trend I've been seeing over about 25 years of working is the flattening of organizations and the changes in work. Back in the 50s, that father i talked about might be a mid-level paper pusher or work on a factory line doing basic work. Factory work and basic corporate work is disappearing. With flatter organizations, ordinary workers aren't as protected from the constant raining down of office politics...I know i have several virtual managers all pulling on me for various things. Corporate politics is nasty business and regular workers used to be protected by supervisors...now the MBA theory is recommending 5 or less levels between you and the CEO. This sounds great in theory - less bureaucracy, etc. but it exposes people to a lot of extra stress they wouldn't normally have.
I'm heating 1999-2000 flashbacks. Back then, all the Internet "utility" companies like Sun, Cisco, the ISPs and the telecoms were spending money like crazy building lavish workplaces for all the dotcom kids with the money the VC firms were giving them. Same thing happened back then as is now -- there's a massive arms race to build the best, most all-inclusive employer out there to attract and keep the elusive people who happen to know the flavor of the moment. Remember, Google serves 3 meals a day, provides free bus service from Hipster Central in San Francisco, and basically operates a college campus. They're widely seen as the benchmark, and every tech company seems to be emulating them to as much of a degree as their funding will let them.
GitHub's a perfect example of one of these utility companies. Slack, Atlassian, AWS, Microsoft (for Azure,) are also good examples. All of them make tools to let web developers crank out phone apps faster, which is the flavor of the moment, or provide infinite infrastructure to run the apps on. Traditional IT shops are also getting in on this trend, because GitHub and friends let CIOs push the magic DevOps button. All of a sudden, your siloed coders working on must-run applications in a mission critical environment switch into a Facebook-esque "move fast and break things" Agile model -- or so the Agile consultants tell them. I work in systems engineering/integration for a very staid company writing mission critical applications for an industry that is risk-averse, and our dev organization had the magic button pushed. I think this is one of the ways GitHub is making their VC money -- the VCs see that corporate executives will gladly write a check to tick the Agile box, and their toolset is seen as one part of it. Get all your developers working on Slack or HipChat as well and you're really cooking!
We'll see what happens this time around when the bubble pops. I actually like a lot of the cloud computing, API-focused and agile development stuff, and I think IT is going to adopt most of it regardless of how critical the stuff they're writing is. But some of it is absolute nonsense outside of the sphere of web development companies writing throwaway apps for phones. Just like in 1999 though, if you can spell HTML, let the good times roll. The truly skilled will always survive.
All I can say is it'll be very interesting to see what happens over the next 4 years. He's basically signaling to every single corporation out there that favors are available for the right price (see Carrier, Ford, etc.) The first thing tech executives are going to ask for is the removal of limits on the H-1B program. This way they can import the workers themselves and not have to go through the body shops to reduce IT and developer salaries. (I think the program is fine and sometimes necessary, but using it to replace a mid- to late-career $100K DBA or sysadmin with a new, mediocre $50K one who won't complain about mandatory unpaid weekend work is not keeping with the spirit of the law.)
No matter how much of an egomaniac I became, I would never want this job. Imagine having to keep hundreds of millions of exceedingly diverse people protected, somewhat happy and balance the diplomatic demands from other countries against your own interests. Seeing Trump's picks for advisors, I wonder how this is going to work out. Yes, Clinton "lost" and I accept that, but I am a little upset that we're getting a real estate huckster, surrounding himself with pro-business buddies, who all seem ready to fire-sale the country to the highest bidder. Hopefully the balance of power will keep some of this in check, but with majorities in both houses he's going to have a very long time with little opposition, and a lot can happen.
The other interesting thing is that he has a lot of very different groups of people who voted him in to satisfy. The religious nuts are going to want abortion bans and fully privatized education, the libertarian/tea party crowd is going to want the government dismantled piece by piece starting with the healthcare law, and all the factory workers are going to want their jobs back. How do you satisfy all of these?
Parsing out that statement, it's pretty difficult to tell what IBM is defining as "professionals" and whether this will be a net increase of US jobs. I've never worked for IBM, but know a lot of current and ex-IBMers. Their MO for ages has been to move all technical work that can possibly be done offshore to low-cost countries and firing all the people in the US and Europe. Because of the shareholders demanding blood every quarter, in my opinion they're too far gone down the road of brain-drain -- it's no longer in their culture to hire and pay smart engineer types.
The other thing to note is that IBM is currently in the process of gutting its actual hardware and software businesses -- they're going down the management consulting road, trying to sell Watson and similar stuff to gullible executives. In that case, if they're going to that model, hiring 25k "professionals" might not be a big deal for them -- they'll be PowerPoint delivery specialists. I also know a lot of current and former Accenture-type employees. Don't expect those professionals to be doing anything resembling technical work. The consulting business model is tailor-made to high-achieving students -- it works exactly like school: 1. Take the top x% of grads from the top y% of universities and offer them jobs as "associate consultants" -- paying a semi-decent salary 2. Indoctrinate them into the corporate culture -- teach them how to talk, how to dress, etc. in orientation. 3. Fly said consultants around the country 45 weeks out of the year delivering PowerPoints, project managing, and sending any actual work to offshore "delivery centers". 4. Structure the company in an up-or-out fashion, exactly like school, and have the associate consultants jump through the appropriate hoops to get to the next level -- this keeps salaries low because the hoop-jumping takes time.
So, these professionals are most likely going to be the consultant-robots you see in their standard-issue Accenture suits, waiting in the airline lounges for the 75th flight of the year...not engineers.
The ones STILL whining are people who were coasting and now have no relevant skills to keep working for Disney or to go get a new job."
Spoken like someone who hasn't had this happen to them yet. FYI, if you're serious, it's not just crusty old BOFHs and mainframers that are getting this treatment. The loopholes that allow service providers to use H-1Bs to fill non-exceptional positions are basically a cap on salaries. I'm betting the positions that were "found" for all these displaced techies are project managers managing a team of 100 newbie developers replacing the one or two guys who know the internal systems inside and out.
In IT, everyone's skill sets have a shelf life, and you're only as good as the last set of buzzwords you learned. Even if it's a rehash of a concept you worked with decades ago, experience doesn't matter the same way it does in other fields. You don't see this happening to older doctors, for example.
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I've noticed similar behavior with 2 other vendors that I use a lot lately -- they'll kill a feature or way of doing something, then build it back in slowly over time. Meanwhile, the end user is stuck with reduced features. I think I'm not Agile enough to understand how this helps.
Example 1 -- VMWare -- after announcing that they were effectively killing the VSphere Client Windows application, they announced a replacement -- the Flash-based web client. Oops, all the browser manufacturers started dumping Flash, _and_ VMWare admins hated it anyway. So now, they're slowly re-introducing a new HTML5 based client that only has basic features, but gets new ones with every release. You have to run the Flash client anyway to do anything beyond basic admin stuff in this latest build.
Example 2 -- Citrix -- During their heart attack-inducing takeover by a hedge fund, they merged XenApp and XenDesktop into a single technology stack to save development money. XenApp (arguably the #1 killer app for healthcare application delivery) actually lost features for several versions in the early 7.x environment while the development teams were building them back into the XenDesktop model. It wasn't uncommon to hear "Oh yeah, this doesn't work in 7.3, it's scheuled for 7.7" or similar.
I'm all for continuous integration, agile development and all that, but does it make sense for enterprise applications to follow the same model of a consumer service like Netflix or Facebook?
For me, docking stations and big monitors allow me to use my laptop in a reasonably comfortable work environment. But, there are still use cases for desktop PCs, especially those that aren't shoved into the back of an all-in-one monitor. You're not going to let a call center employee in a regulated, locked down environment pull out his iPad or laptop to work, for example. A cash register is likely going to be some sort of PC, same thing with a kiosk or ATM. And at the high end, workstations are meant for "real" work - though most have the Xeon processors in them. It's an interesting time; desktops and thin clients are sort of merging and tablet use is demanding more of CPU manufacturers' attention. And this makes sense - mobile stuff has the constant pressure to be squeezed into smaller spaces, produce less heat, provide more on-chipset functionality and run cooler at the same time. I'm still surprised when I see a Surface Pro or other convertible tablet and remember that there's a full-fat Intel processor crammed inside that tiny case without melting through the bottom!
I just think the desktop market is maturing and there's less and less that Intel processors and chipsets don't natively provide. PC processors are already insanely fast and powerful for what typical users throw at them. Desktops aren't dead, they're just a niche market these days, but one that is still there. The pundits want to claim that no one wants a powerful client device and just wants all their stuff streamed from the cloud onto a tablet or phone they don't control. I think that's true in the consumer space, but businesses still have use cases for desktops.
I'm OK with this, which is probably going to get me labeled a lazy French socialist. (I'm in the US.) But, I've worked jobs where I've had to be available 24/7 on an on-call rotation basis. Weeks where I've had to do this sucked badly. It was earlier in my career pre-kids, but the feeling is exactly like having a newborn at home in terms of the sleep quality you get. You're never fully asleep after being woken up at 3 AM for yet another false alarm (or real emergency!) And, I was lucky it was rotation work -- lots of companies have cut so much staff that they just make everyone on-call for the applications they support these days.
I think that a lot of people, especially young ones in their first jobs, don't realize how much they're being taken advantage of by employers. The other people against this are hard-driving "tech entrepreneurs" who have the crazy Type-A personalities anyway and would work 30 hours a day if it was possible. If you're just out of college and don't have a family, significant other, or even a time consuming hobby, you might not realize that it's healthy to turn off work when it's time to go home, and spend the remainder of the day focusing on your own pursuits. Same thing with the entrepreneurs, they live to work and have no idea why anyone would want to be doing anything other than responding to 3 AM emails. The reality is that the vast majority of people are not driven to work 18 hour days -- they want more out of life.
Does this make me lazy? I doubt it -- I work like crazy to fit my tasks into a standard workday, and count myself lucky that I'm not in support anymore responding to pager calls at night. I do have a self-imposed flexible schedule -- my wife has a long commute so I sometimes do a lot of family things during the day. So, I will occasionally send out a 2 AM email, but it's my choice because I left work 3 hours early that day. What i don't get is people who call this move by the French "lazy" -- do they really want to be chained to work 24 hours a day? Do they not have lives outside of work?
I try very hard not to look at email, Facebook or the news until I've had a chance to wake up, get the kids out of bed and get ready for the day. Working for a global company in systems integration, most of the first emails in the morning are from India or other countries far ahead of us timezone-wise, and they're almost never good news. My first few morning messages from the last week have been similar to:
- Yet another broken code release failed in production and they're throwing it back over the wall to the systems guys for the 20 millionth time
- The developers are going to be late again delivering something that was due 3 months ago
- Company that has repeatedly presented itself as world-renowned Technology X experts is proving yet again they were lying
Looking at that as the first thing you see when you wake up, it sets the tone for the rest of the day. You wake up mad, aren't as nice as you should be to the spouse or kids, resulting in "if mama's not happy, no one's happy", resulting in pretty much guaranteeing a bad day. If everyone's doing this every day, no wonder we have so many pissed off, uncivil interactions with others. Everyone's mad!
It's not as roll-your-own as it used to be, but I still enjoy working with computers. The big trend I see causing long term issues is consumerization -- everyone is demanding services that work 100% of the time on their phones, so everything is geared towards that. My big thing is scripting and automation -- making something idiot proof so I can send it out to idiots. ;-) I don't have much time for gaming anymore as I have 2 little kids, but when they get old enough I'm sure I'll get back into it.
One thing I miss of late is physical hardware. I'm a data center nerd at heart and love getting the odd project to do equipment installs, etc. These days it's kind of a treat to do that because all our on-premises stuff runs in VMs and other stuff runs in some cloud data center...I can't remember the last time I worked directly with some of our VM host servers. But, it's a change just like any other in our field. So many people I know are upset about change, and yes, the environment has gotten a lot less "fun" in that a lot of problems are solved. But like I keep explaining over and over to bosses and anyone who will listen, the problems don't disappear -- they just move around, some get smaller while others get larger. Even with the downward salary pressure and rampant ageism, I don't think I'd go back and do something different even if I could -- if you keep learning and pick your projects carefully things stay interesting.
I think companies will still build their own image or use the Windows 10 provisioning tools to slice and dice the image deployed by the factory, but for Lenovo's laptops this makes sense. ThinkPad professional series users (T and P series) are paying a lot of money for their machines compared to the $300 consumer junk at the low end of the line. I'm just about to replace my T540p and the prices are super-high, almost Apple level margin. It should be noted that you do get what you pay for - ThinkPad users are pretty loyal customers and the laptops have a certain "anti-hipster" all-business look and feel.
I think all PC manufacturers should adopt this approach. Leave the bloatware for the consumer models...after all, everyone needs 3 firewall and antivirus applications running on home machines. Ever since Windows 7, Microsoft has been working with the vendors to build more of the software controls into the OS for various hardware components, reducing the need for buggy vendor applications to do things like control volume and brightness. (One of the worst things about building a hybrid desktop-laptop disk image for PCs is managing the multiple post-OS installations of vendor packages that are required to control things.)
This just makes good sense. It gets Lenovo some good press to put the bloatware security debacle behind them, and sets the tone for other manufacturers. After all, aren't PCs dying? Doesn't everyone use business apps on a 9" tablet screen? In that market, people who need PCs are going to pay specialty prices to get a quality product.
I've worked for companies whose core business was not IT, and also for the service providers who "service" businesses who outsource their IT. The one thing I can definitely see happening long term to companies that kill their IT departments is a loss of creative solutions to unique in-house problems. Here's why:
IT services companies don't care about the business. - I say this as someone who works for one. It's almost impossible to get an employee of a third party to put in more than the minimum required to keep the contract and their jobs. The only ones who seem to succeed in this are services companies that sign long term contracts, keep local people and keep working conditions good enough that people don't quit.
Services companies will only do standard things, absent minimum 6 figure change orders - An IT services company's goal is to keep the cost of delivering the service as low as possible, otherwise they don't make money. The ways they do that is offshoring of tasks (as we see in this and many other cases,) or charging the customer for every microsecond of effort expended that isn't explicitly spelled out in the contract. Remember, the services company has to come in cheaper than the existing IT department (on paper) and has to generate enough money to pay a lot of non-technical management salaries such as multiple layers of account executives, project managers, change managers, etc. You can't offshore reliably unless the task can be boiled down to a single non-changing script that executes with very little technical staff involvement. This is where we get stuff like ITIL, a weeks-long change management process, etc.
Everything is slooooowwww. - Any company that outsources their IT can no longer go down the hall and ask someone to help them. Anecdote: The specialized IT services company I work for offshored their tech support but kept some application support guys local. I needed to get access to an internal application controlled by these guys, and was told by the outsourcer they'd be fired if they helped me without a ticket. I actually had to go back to my desk, file a ticket, and show them that it was in the system on the way to them. The change was done right away, but the ticket bounced from a technical router in India to a first level helpdesk in Costa Rica, to the application support guys...it took over a day for that to happen. Forget about actually getting something changed in production -- it takes weeks in the worst organizations I've seen.
Nothing new or innovative will come out of IT again. - This is actually what worries me the most. IT services companies doing the lowest common denominator work are not going to come up with any brilliant cost-saving strategies other than "buy more services from us" or "buy our Cloud." Companies that do IT right actually do gain benefits from IT proportional to their cost. Over time, relying too hard on offshore IT that can't do anything beyond the basics makes it harder to convince CIOs that they should consider bringing it back in-house.
Think about it -- ITIL is actively designed to prevent changes to systems. Agile, JIRA and full reliance on frameworks on the dev side is designed to reduce the required skill level of developers. Both of these are championed by offshoring firms because they make it easier to break up the work and send it to the cheapest possible location.
I think that was the original reason for public companies to exist. Unfortunately, any real investment is now so far abstracted from shareholders that it barely registers. On one side are the investment banks doing high frequency trading and demanding constant increased revenue, and on the other are the intermediate mutual funds, hedge funds and others that own most of a public company's shares. Individual investors have very little to do with a company's success -- most hot tech stocks don't even pay dividends and they have to make their profits by selling when the price gets pumped up. Public companies don't answer to their individual shareholders -- they have to please their institutional ones and have to make short term, employee-unfriendly and consumer-hostile decisions as a result. Founder CEOs who care about their companies often end up getting pushed out because of this.
A good recent example of this is Citrix. I work in airline IT, where XenApp is being increasingly used to make Windows deployments simpler. I also know lots of healthcare IT workers -- XenApp/XenDesktop is basically the only choice in app delivery for hospitals. They have a massive customer base, fiercely loyal customers and a huge bench of people who specialize in XenApp. Plus, almost every electronic health records application is a fat, bloated mess requiring massive processor and RAM to run - basically all of them are hack jobs and need to run on server-class hardware. Given that, you would think Citrix would be happy raking in licensing fees like Microsoft does -- it is not cheap software. Nope! An "activist investment" firm (Elliott Management) bought them a few years back, threw out the CEO (who founded the company)then cut development funding to the bone and started piecing out the company for sale. It took a few messy releases of their core products to convince the new owners to start reinvesting resources in them. The tech press was posting stories wondering what big healthcare companies would do without a stable Citrix product.
It all boils down to the short term nature of thinking that public companies are forced into by the market. This is terrible for long term stability, but great if you're trying to pump up the stock price for a quick sale. It's always been there, but the increased speed of the market has brought it to a point where no public company can do anything the investors see as long term investment. Lowering the barriers to individual investors is just a tiny fraction of the problem -- it used to be a huge expensive pain to buy or sell a stock so people bought for the long term. The other problem is that so many people have their retirements tied up in the market more directly. When it was insurance companies and pension funds doing most of the investing, there was a lot more room for error and time to make up for mistakes. Now, a single screw up doesn't get averaged out over time, so there's constant pressure for unsustainable growth. I almost want to see something even more abstract than a mutual fund offered for long term investors so that companies have some breathing room and don't make decisions that kill them in the long run.
I agree that some people who are stuck in rural communities where the entire economy has disappeared are in this spot. However, I do have experience with this - I've worked several menial positions (gas station, stock clerk in a department store, fast food) and anyone who was still there beyond their early 20s was there because they were stuck there. They lacked education, and I'm not of the opinion that they were closet scientists waiting to be discovered. I can see how people think that this is condescending, mean, etc...but if you work all day with reasonably intelligent people you might assume that everyone is like that -- I assure you they're not. Education is lost on a small fraction of these people..nothing you do will help them.
As for smugness, I'm not -- I know that my job is next to be eliminated, as is anything that doesn't explicitly require human hands or a more fluid less logical brain. I do feel that people who can't help themselves need to be guided by people smarter than them...and that goes for everyone. No one is a lone wolf, expert at everything.
Another anecdote from my past -- I went to college with a guy who worked the night shift at a local warehouse for a grocery store chain. According to him, the work was miserable, hot in summer, freezing in winter, and consisted of picking, palletizing and loading groceries on trucks. But, it was a union job and therefore paid well with the shift differentials, etc. One of the things he mentioned was that there were a ton of full timers working there, and the big step for them was to graduate from part time to full time eligible union members -- because the union would ensure they would have steady work for as long as they wanted. The full timers were the only ones eligible to become forklift operators and other slightly less mind numbing jobs. This is why the old economy was so successful -- even if it was a horrible job you hated, you could get a job with very little education and have enough money to raise a family and get by. This new phase we're going into isn't going to have these safe jobs, and any that remain are going to be forced down to minimum wage. BTW, the same goes for the customer facing positions in union grocery stores - look at all the 40 and 50 year old cashier supervisors and department managers. When A&P went bankrupt and closed tons of supermarkets here, it really threw some people for a loop because they'd been working at the same supermarket chain for 25+ years and the union had to scramble to find the most senior ones jobs. Multiply this by millions and you get a taste of what's coming.
The things that really bother me about Facebook are the fake news (on both sides) and the fact that it's a total echo chamber (also on both sides.) Since the platform is designed to pull you in, of course it's going to show you only things you like. A right wing Republican is going to watch Fox News and listen to Rush Limbaugh, and that's where almost all of them get their news and opinons from. Same goes on the left -- MSNBC is certainly not going to try to publish an opinion that might alienate one of their assets...er...viewers. Facebook and other online sources are the primary news source for almost everyone under 30, and they use algorithms that fine-tune the narrative for anyone watching. It makes sense because their business model is collecting all your activity and social network, packaging you up and selling you to advertisers.
I think Trump won for two reasons -- first, social media really did have an effect on people. Second, the traditional media were treating him as a complete joke right up until the election. I admit that I was thinking like that too -- how could anyone elect an offensive, chronically bankrupt real estate investor with zero political or military experience? But, Facebook and friends concentrate people's opinions and the anger is strong among many people...when your company has the power to magnify sentiments like this and convince people the world is falling apart, yes, you are a media company whether you like it or not.
I don't agree with Uber's business model, but they have explicitly stated from day 1 that regulations don't apply to them, "this time it's different", we're disruptors, etc. A move like refusing to follow the DMV's process will be seen by the company's true fans as a big middle finger to those "corrupt Luddite government organizations." It's the equivalent of taking your ball and going home.
What will probably happen next is Uber will wallpaper smaller non-CA state/city officals' offices with money until they agree to let them operate. They'll turn around and say how progressive these cities are, and look at Luddite California...oh by the way we're moving to Texas/North Carolina/Georgia to spite them...
I'd be fine with Uber if they paid their drivers as employees, followed the local taxi licensing procedures like all the other cab companies do, and incurred the same expenses a traditional cab company did to get into business. They make money because they just declare the rules don't apply to them. I see why too - so many people I meet in the tech sector are classic Ayn Rand devotees who basically want the government dismantled anyway. Most techies are obsessed with automation and productivity and have no idea that basically every business in the world has to follow rules, pay corrupt officials, and has startup costs.
And why is it not sustainable? Because the greedy business owner who owns that assembly line wants to keep all of that $75K for himself?
This is what I don't get about business owners. They complain bitterly about "crippling regulations" and "job killing policies" but they're immeasurably better off than people they employ. Regulations are not expensive to comply with. Spending a few extra minutes filling out paperwork once a year isn't going to kill your business. Paying for reasonable worker safety equipment isn't going to bankrupt you. And, if paying employees a reasonable wage will bankrupt you, then you shouldn't be in business. I have absolutely no sympathy for wealthy restaurant owners making huge profits, then claiming that they can't pay someone $15 an hour. Business owners benefit from tax loopholes that wage owners can only dream of...they pay significantly less tax percentage-wise than individuals. Big companies pay zero or get refunds. The minimum wage complainers earn double an average employee's hourly salary on the first restaurant check, and the amount they pay in salary is tax-deductible as cost of goods sold.
It's funny how these things go from a few "wackos" talking about robots taking over manufacturing, to the US government actually acknowledging there may be a problem with the system sooner than we think. I do think people are trying to lay the groundwork now, to minimize the negative effects. I could imagine some pretty bad methods of "population control" to use a euphemistic term if we tried to carry over the current system with majority unemployment being the norm.
Of course, this is a parting shot from the outgoing administration -- given Trump's cabinet picks, I foresee some pretty nasty congressional fights and an eventual dismantling of most social programs. The Social Security system may be handed over to hedge funds and banks for safe keeping, Meidicare may become a voucher system that just enriches the insurance companies, and what little welfare there is left may be taken away. I'm happy the current administration is getting it on the record that we've been warned...it could be an interesting historical footnote or maybe a wake-up call.
The fact is that even though "AI" isn't nearly as thrilling as the pundits claim, it is good enough at this point to displace a huge number of very vulnerable people. People aren't working assembly line or fast food jobs because they love the work...they're doing it because it's the only thing they're capable of. That's the first problem -- a lot of people are poorly educated, and a great number of those won't benefit from additional education resources getting thrown at them. Median IQ is 100 -- there's a lot of people at or below that. Unless you want to start engineering society to model "Brave New World," you either need to find something for these people to do, or allow them to do nothing and stop complaining.
The next iteration is what I'm worried about -- professionals could easily have their roles reduced. Doctors and lawyers are a good example -- most of medical and law school is designed to select for people with photographic memories and dump volumes of information into their brains. When that knowledge doesn't need to be kept in someone's brain anymore, the status of the professional holding it is reduced. Same thing goes for IT -- I'm in systems architecture so I'm designing stuff and coming up with procedures, and it's obvious where things are headed. Hands-on IT work is almost at the point where we just need to tell someone to plug in cables, remove hard drives, etc. Development is moving offshore and increasingly done as a series of pre-formed code components and microservices. Note that this also goes for almost every office job out there too. Working in corporate IT, I see so many generic C-strudent business majors from Big State University performing an updated version of a 40 year old process. It sounds like a good idea to increase productivity by automating and replacing them, but I haven't lost sight of the fact that these people are having kids, buying products and living in communities. Take them out, and no one's around to buy the things your company is making in their fully automated factories.
Lots of people are saying this will never happen and that anyone who suggests it will is a Luddite. Maybe so, but I don't see anywhere for most workers to go -- there's no retraining for jobs that don't exist in the modern AI world. It's going to require a radical rethinking of how we define work, wealth, etc. And if it isn't done very carefully, it will lead to a very bad end. Imagine the uproar when you tell everyone that the retirement savings they worked for all their lives won't need to be saved up by future generations, or that we have to enact more social safety programs for the 80% and rising unemployed people out there. If this is done badly, it will lead to the owners of businesses hoarding everything for themselves or calls to control the population in certain ways.
Correlation does not imply causation. There, now that the elephant in the room has been addressed...
I can totally see social media leading to depression long term. Seriously, you have an entire set of platforms dedicated to championing narcissism and self promotion. I mentioned this a while back in a post about LinkedIn -- one of the things that drives me nuts is, having LinkedIn contacts from the tech and the business world, I notice the business guys posting the same shallow crap they do on Facebook looking for a circle of positive affirmation.
Why do I think it makes people depressed and anxious? A couple reasons...
- It's one-sided -- no one posts about the totally uninteresting, crappy boring parts of their lives. Unless you're rich beyond imagination or a celebrity, everyone will have down moments in their lives, periods of disappointment, and very sad things happen to them.
- There's a pressure to be "always on" -- Stemming from the one-sided positive view of everything, people who might not be doing so well might feel the pressure to act like everything's fine. Having been there, as everyone has, I can't imagine how that feels in social media happy-land...it sucks in real life! There's a constant pressure to be on 24/7, sharing amazing details of your life. Thinking that everyone except you is doing perfectly is a recipe for depression.
- The trolls -- Oh, the trolls, the cyberbullies...The Internet in general and social media specifically brings out the worst in people because they feel they're protected from behind the nice safe keyboard. Look at any news site comments section that uses Facebook identities. Now, people who rant on MSN or CNN are a self-selecting bunch, I'll grant you that -- but take a look sometime and see what people post. You'll see some of the most hateful, racist, angry, spiteful, snide commentary...right next to "John Smith, History Teacher, East Nowhere High School." I've had moments where I've thought "No way, that can't be that person's real name and occupation!" -- and then gone to LinkedIn or similar and found out that yes, that history teacher, dental hygienist or business owner really does correspond to the profile. It's (in my opinion) a sad commentary on how un-civil we are to each other.
Personally, I'm not a big fan. I'd rather blog or post long-form comments on places like this than be constantly tweeting out yet another happy status update to make other people miserable. I enjoy thinking before writing and tend to prefer civil conversations.
The only thing that matters to the macro-economy as a whole is employment. Unless you plan on replacing the entire "money as a store of value" system, you need a supply of all kinds of jobs across the employment spectrum to ensure money can flow. Otherwise, we see what's happening now -- the rich just hoard all the money and pull up the ladder behind them. The only measures of economic health that matter are employment and velocity of money. Trade is only beneficial when both countries are on the same economic footing.
India's regulations may seem harsh, but they do ensure that manufacturing remains a viable career path. The fantasy of turning everyone in the US into intellectuals and forcing everyone to go to college has to stop at some point. You need a 2-track system -- one way to a comfortable living is education and professional work, and the other is high-paying factory and trade work with a similar career path guaranteed by unions or similar devices.
Well, let's think about this one...which one would you rather manufacture?
- A high-margin computer, with high end components, requiring a lot of engineering effort to get right and keep supporting over an extended life cycle, or
- An even higher-margin, throwaway, replaced every 2 years, locked down device, on which you get a 30% cut of every single thing a user installs on it -- requiring lots less engineering since user interactions are artificially limited
I have been a long-time Mac user and supporter, but I'm mainly on Windows and Linux PCs now. Even locked-down spyware-laden Windows 10 is more customizable than Mac OS is these days, and most Windows/Linux hardware manufacturers don't solder the components onto the motherboard. (Surface Pro, you're the exception of course, but at least there's still ports on it.)
A lot of people might not know that India has a very protectionist policy regarding manufactured goods. It's very difficult to get items into the country from outside if there's any chance they will be used to conduct business. The company I work for is currently engaged in a love affair with India and Brazil for offshore development. Some of the stuff they're writing requires local access to hardware they can't just buy off the shelf from a distributor...there are only a few manufacturers out there and they're not making it in India. Getting anything into both of these countries that wasn't made there doesn't just involve paying a duty -- there's a byzantine maze of regulations, forms, local officials to pay, special assessments, personal visits to Government Agency X for stamps and signatures, etc. Last time this happened it took 4 months to ship the offshore company hardware -- and that's with our company having connections in the form of logistics specialists who know what actually needs to happen.
Apple just doesn't want to lose a potential market of over a billion people. They'd rather take the short term "loss" manufacturing at slightly above slave labor rates to ensure their products can be sold domestically. This is also happening to a lesser extent in Brazil, for the same reasons.
It's very ironic that a country whose major export seems to be IT "services" to the US and Europe has such a protectionist policy regarding manufacturing. Maybe they see what's happening in their customers' countries and don't want to have a rebellion on their hands when wages start going up inside their country. Personally, I'm for protectionism. It's a balance against the power of companies. Growing up in the Rust Belt and watching whole cities get hollowed out as companies chased cheap Southern, then foreign labor, was not fun. I seriously doubt Trump is going to follow through on his tariffs and protectionist platform...his buddies are going to demand that he put a stop to it, and they have more power than the working class types who helped vote him in.
I think the costs are similar to other tech startups - it's no different than the dotcom bubble:
- They need a massive, slick marketing and social media campaign -- those don't come cheap because they're creative work. Look at how many millions of dollars companies waste on things like choosing colors and redesigning their logos.
- To build marketing share, they have to sell below cost. Chase is offering $30 of free Uber rides to anyone who has one of their cards...they're not just giving that away.
- Uber has to maintain office space in some of the highest-rent districts of the most expensive cities in the world. That office space has to conform to tech bubble standards, including the designer furniture, collaborative work pods, etc.
- They have to pay huge salaries to "RESTful JavaScript Engineers" banging out code for their apps and website. In the last bubble, the magic word was HTML -- this bubble appears to be centered around APIs and frameworks but it's the same idea.
- In order to "poach top talent" from Google and other companies, they have to spend massive amounts on perks, including celebrity chefs cooking 3 meals a day, bus service, personal trainers, accommodations for employees' pets, full service concierges to keep the employees at the office 100 hours a week, etc.
- And of course, the founders and management class have to draw their big salaries and bonuses.
The one thing that is different with Uber is that I'm sure they spend boatloads on "lobbying." They have to go to every single state transportation and insurance official, city council and mayor of big cities out there and...tell them how great Uber is. Corruption is way more overt in most local governments than it is at the federal level, so I wouldn't be surprised if they're accidentally losing large sums of cash in these officials' offices during their visits. The amounts might be lower, but local officials will come right out and demand it rather than at the Congressional level where you have to filter it through lobbyists.
I'm still surprised that this Second Dotcom Bubble is playing out almost exactly like the First Dotcom Bubble. Uber's probably being rational -- live as high as you can for as long as the money holds out.
One of the things that appeared during the last few bubbles were various non-GAAP measurements of revenue, profitability, etc. that startups published to show their progress. It's very interesting to see that they weren't able to use these tricks^Wtechniques to paper over the losses they're making trying to get to a massive market share. It makes sense -- they seem to have the public on their side willing to throw out all the taxi regulations in the name of disruption. If they can get all the rules repealed, or write new ones that favor them, then long term it will work out even If they give away rides for less than cost. They just have to keep the VCs on the hook and paying money to fill the lobbyists' brown paper bags.
I took a couple of accounting classes in college back in the Dark Ages, and things like revenue recognition, cost of goods sold, etc. were very straightforward back then. The classic examples of a business were a manufacturer who buys raw materials and pays employees to turn out a value-added good that's sold at retail, or a professional charging an hourly or job-based rate for services. Now so many US companies are just pass-through entities charging a markup for services, or software companies not selling a product per se, or both. It makes it much more difficult to understand the company's finances, and I'm sure they prefer it that way so they don't have to explain uncomfortable things to investors, or just say "this time it's different", etc.
As for Uber themselves, I really don't like the fact that they choose to walk in and declare that the rules don't apply to them. The business owners' cries of crippling regulation ring quite hollow to me. In addition to protecting the public, I feel regulations balance the power that businesses have over ordinary workers and consumers. If I'm wrong about this, I'd love to hear real world examples of regulations that are "unbearable" for the typical small business owner. I feel it's just people complaining needlessly -- no one likes paying fees, taxes, etc. But be careful what you wish for -- without rules businesses will once again be allowed to sell unsafe products with no recourse or charge whatever they want for products without regard to all consumers' ability to pay.
I'm happy Finland is going down this route. They'll be way ahead of other countries when basically everyone of normal intelligence is unemployed due to automation. The US is going to get very ugly before anything like this happens, and if it did there would be a conservative uprising that I think would cause another civil war.
It makes perfect sense to anyone willing to see beyond themselves and the immediate future:
-Increased entrepreneurship and new initiatives - Mid career professionals who have responsibilities aren't going to give up income from a job to go out and try some new business. People who have been thrown out of the workforce due to ageism after 40 might do this, but a lot don't have the basic skills or personality needed (I know I don't!) Basic income might encourage some of the more courageous to jump off the cliff and try something new.
Increased late-career field changes and education -- Not many people in their 40s/50s can just jump out of the workforce for 4 years to learn a new skill, nor can they afford to start at a new grad wage in most cases. Having something to fall back on might encourage people to dump the job they hate and try something else.
Allowing slackers to slack and workers to work - I work in big companies, and personally know so many people who are absolute dead wood. Some are just waiting to be found out and hoping they can make it to retirement. Others make the workplace toxic by complaining loudly about every single little thing. Getting these people out of jobs they hate and into something more suitable could be a function of the basic income. Theoretically you'd only be left with productive people who want to be there because they could walk whenever they felt like it.
Curbing employee abuse - Another thing I see a lot is people who are absolutely stuck in their jobs because they can't live without an income. Employers use this leverage to exploit their workers.
I do think something has to be done. Factory jobs and paper movement jobs are disappearing quickly. One of the biggest social security disability insurance applicant pools are all the people in their 40s and 50s who can't find work. Rather than make them convince some doctor they're disabled, just give them the money they need to survive.
I wonder if it's not necessarily over-medication, but a reduction in under-reporting. Even in the golden age of the middle class (1950s or so in the US) people never talked about mental issues. Now, everyone talks about them, everyone's in therapy and everyone's taking something. It used to be somewhat normal for the father of a family to come home from work and get exceedingly drunk if he had a bad day -- that's not seen as normal now. Same thing with smoking - it's a really bad habit, but having almost every adult inhaling nicotine all day probably masked a lot of problems. So, the reduction in self-medication along with a reduction in the stigma associated with getting help might explain this. One problem I see is that if you need real help, not just a bunch of pills, that part of the system isn't there anymore. Most states are completely done with inpatient mental health services, only providing enough funding to house the truly dangerous and some of the cases that are hopeless and can't ever transition to a normal life. There's no way to call a time-out and dig into what's really wrong.
I do think that society has changed to a much higher level of under-the-surface stress. Those of us who work in IT for big companies are just waiting for the MBAs to finish their reports that will prompt the CIO to offshore the workforce. Even if you're not a "model consumer" everything costs a lot and is geared to having two well-compensated spouses working. As a parent in that spot, I can attest that it's very hard keeping all the balls in the air - you have to simultaneously focus on your job, your financial situation, your kids and your spouse. It's very stressful and I could definitely see people losing their grip on things if any extra stress gets heaped on top of it.
One trend I've been seeing over about 25 years of working is the flattening of organizations and the changes in work. Back in the 50s, that father i talked about might be a mid-level paper pusher or work on a factory line doing basic work. Factory work and basic corporate work is disappearing. With flatter organizations, ordinary workers aren't as protected from the constant raining down of office politics...I know i have several virtual managers all pulling on me for various things. Corporate politics is nasty business and regular workers used to be protected by supervisors...now the MBA theory is recommending 5 or less levels between you and the CEO. This sounds great in theory - less bureaucracy, etc. but it exposes people to a lot of extra stress they wouldn't normally have.
I'm heating 1999-2000 flashbacks. Back then, all the Internet "utility" companies like Sun, Cisco, the ISPs and the telecoms were spending money like crazy building lavish workplaces for all the dotcom kids with the money the VC firms were giving them. Same thing happened back then as is now -- there's a massive arms race to build the best, most all-inclusive employer out there to attract and keep the elusive people who happen to know the flavor of the moment. Remember, Google serves 3 meals a day, provides free bus service from Hipster Central in San Francisco, and basically operates a college campus. They're widely seen as the benchmark, and every tech company seems to be emulating them to as much of a degree as their funding will let them.
GitHub's a perfect example of one of these utility companies. Slack, Atlassian, AWS, Microsoft (for Azure,) are also good examples. All of them make tools to let web developers crank out phone apps faster, which is the flavor of the moment, or provide infinite infrastructure to run the apps on. Traditional IT shops are also getting in on this trend, because GitHub and friends let CIOs push the magic DevOps button. All of a sudden, your siloed coders working on must-run applications in a mission critical environment switch into a Facebook-esque "move fast and break things" Agile model -- or so the Agile consultants tell them. I work in systems engineering/integration for a very staid company writing mission critical applications for an industry that is risk-averse, and our dev organization had the magic button pushed. I think this is one of the ways GitHub is making their VC money -- the VCs see that corporate executives will gladly write a check to tick the Agile box, and their toolset is seen as one part of it. Get all your developers working on Slack or HipChat as well and you're really cooking!
We'll see what happens this time around when the bubble pops. I actually like a lot of the cloud computing, API-focused and agile development stuff, and I think IT is going to adopt most of it regardless of how critical the stuff they're writing is. But some of it is absolute nonsense outside of the sphere of web development companies writing throwaway apps for phones. Just like in 1999 though, if you can spell HTML, let the good times roll. The truly skilled will always survive.
All I can say is it'll be very interesting to see what happens over the next 4 years. He's basically signaling to every single corporation out there that favors are available for the right price (see Carrier, Ford, etc.) The first thing tech executives are going to ask for is the removal of limits on the H-1B program. This way they can import the workers themselves and not have to go through the body shops to reduce IT and developer salaries. (I think the program is fine and sometimes necessary, but using it to replace a mid- to late-career $100K DBA or sysadmin with a new, mediocre $50K one who won't complain about mandatory unpaid weekend work is not keeping with the spirit of the law.)
No matter how much of an egomaniac I became, I would never want this job. Imagine having to keep hundreds of millions of exceedingly diverse people protected, somewhat happy and balance the diplomatic demands from other countries against your own interests. Seeing Trump's picks for advisors, I wonder how this is going to work out. Yes, Clinton "lost" and I accept that, but I am a little upset that we're getting a real estate huckster, surrounding himself with pro-business buddies, who all seem ready to fire-sale the country to the highest bidder. Hopefully the balance of power will keep some of this in check, but with majorities in both houses he's going to have a very long time with little opposition, and a lot can happen.
The other interesting thing is that he has a lot of very different groups of people who voted him in to satisfy. The religious nuts are going to want abortion bans and fully privatized education, the libertarian/tea party crowd is going to want the government dismantled piece by piece starting with the healthcare law, and all the factory workers are going to want their jobs back. How do you satisfy all of these?
Parsing out that statement, it's pretty difficult to tell what IBM is defining as "professionals" and whether this will be a net increase of US jobs. I've never worked for IBM, but know a lot of current and ex-IBMers. Their MO for ages has been to move all technical work that can possibly be done offshore to low-cost countries and firing all the people in the US and Europe. Because of the shareholders demanding blood every quarter, in my opinion they're too far gone down the road of brain-drain -- it's no longer in their culture to hire and pay smart engineer types.
The other thing to note is that IBM is currently in the process of gutting its actual hardware and software businesses -- they're going down the management consulting road, trying to sell Watson and similar stuff to gullible executives. In that case, if they're going to that model, hiring 25k "professionals" might not be a big deal for them -- they'll be PowerPoint delivery specialists. I also know a lot of current and former Accenture-type employees. Don't expect those professionals to be doing anything resembling technical work. The consulting business model is tailor-made to high-achieving students -- it works exactly like school:
1. Take the top x% of grads from the top y% of universities and offer them jobs as "associate consultants" -- paying a semi-decent salary
2. Indoctrinate them into the corporate culture -- teach them how to talk, how to dress, etc. in orientation.
3. Fly said consultants around the country 45 weeks out of the year delivering PowerPoints, project managing, and sending any actual work to offshore "delivery centers".
4. Structure the company in an up-or-out fashion, exactly like school, and have the associate consultants jump through the appropriate hoops to get to the next level -- this keeps salaries low because the hoop-jumping takes time.
So, these professionals are most likely going to be the consultant-robots you see in their standard-issue Accenture suits, waiting in the airline lounges for the 75th flight of the year...not engineers.
The ones STILL whining are people who were coasting and now have no relevant skills to keep working for Disney or to go get a new job."
Spoken like someone who hasn't had this happen to them yet. FYI, if you're serious, it's not just crusty old BOFHs and mainframers that are getting this treatment. The loopholes that allow service providers to use H-1Bs to fill non-exceptional positions are basically a cap on salaries. I'm betting the positions that were "found" for all these displaced techies are project managers managing a team of 100 newbie developers replacing the one or two guys who know the internal systems inside and out.
In IT, everyone's skill sets have a shelf life, and you're only as good as the last set of buzzwords you learned. Even if it's a rehash of a concept you worked with decades ago, experience doesn't matter the same way it does in other fields. You don't see this happening to older doctors, for example.